Monitoring underwater equipment, such as wellheads, manifolds, risers, anchors, Pipeline End Terminations (PLETS), Blow Out Preventors (BOPs), pumps, touch down points, suction piles, chains, slip joints, and pipelines is important to ensuring the safe and reliable operation of such equipment. Through environmental and/or operational conditions, such underwater equipment can experience undesirable movement, vibration conditions, and temperature differentials. For example, vortex-induced vibration (VIV) is responsible for the majority of the fatigue damage in deep water drilling risers. Damage from VIV is a major issue and is potentially very dangerous for operational personnel and the environment.
Conventional techniques for detecting and monitoring movement and vibration require the installation of vibration, accelerometers, and/or motion sensors directly on the equipment to be monitored. Accordingly, available systems require that they be physically attached to the equipment, either by integrating a monitoring device into the equipment prior to putting the equipment in operation, or by attaching the monitoring device to the equipment while that equipment is in place. Moreover, each underwater structure to be monitored requires its own vibration, accelerometer, and/or motion sensor.
External temperature variations of subsea components are an indication of internal issues within the system. For instance, hot spots can indicate cracks in insulation, overheating pumps, thinning of internal pipe walls, or other problems. Cold spots can indicate hydrate formations inside pipes or equipment that either reduce or totally block flow, and other problems. Currently the only way to measure these temperature deltas are with point probes either attached to the subsea equipment or carried by a diver or remote vehicle. This provides a very sparse temperature “map” with many gaps.
In addition, access to equipment installed on the seafloor can be difficult, and the installation of additional devices directly on the monitored equipment poses the risk of damaging that subsea equipment. The devices installed must be connected to subsea power sources, or have batteries installed (which requires periodic changing). The data recorded by the devices must be downloaded periodically, which typically requires a direct connection for large amounts of data. Both of these scenarios require contact of the subsea equipment by divers, Remote Operated Vehicles (ROVs), or Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs), which is costly and risks damaging expensive subsea equipment. Accordingly, it would be desirable to provide systems and methods that allowed for the monitoring of underwater equipment, without requiring monitors that are directly attached to such equipment, and preferably a single monitoring device to provide multiple monitoring functions.